Transient Thermal-Electric Simulation and Experiment of Heat Transfer in Welding Tip for Reflow Soldering Process

Welding tip is an appliance for making footprint to connect the arm and head gimbal assembly (HGA) together in reflow soldering process. The welding tip is made from 3 materials: copper alloy, stainless steel, and haynes 230. It works based on Joule heating effect. The haynes 230 head tip is the area used to create a footprint. In the past, failure in the reflow soldering process of a hard disk drive factory was found resulting in defective products; therefore, a solution to resolve this problem must be researched. This article reports a solution to the aforementioned problem by using transient thermal-electric simulation to investigate the heat transfer in the welding tip and a simple experiment to verify the simulation. By using ANSYS, the simulation results revealed the temperature of welding tip. The maximum temperature was 406°C on the head tip at t=0.7s and then it rapidly decreased. The reflow soldering process failure occurred when footprint was done after 0.7s causing the temperature to be too low for melting the solder so the arm and HGA were unable to connect to each other. We proposed simple solutions and ways to improve the efficacy of the reflow soldering process; e.g., footprints should be done at 0.7s, and the welding tip’s material should be changed from haynes 230 to 556. After the factory implemented our results, the problem could truly be resolved. Not only do products have a higher quality but also miscellaneous expenses from defective products are saved.